Day 2 Wrap Up - COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0

Hey everyone,

What a day of building! We’re loving the inspiration and collaboration we’re seeing right throughout this impactful community.

Live speaker series

Today, we kicked off a series of live webinars to help provide context on the COVID-19 pandemic, ramp you up on project planning and offer support with technical tips.

We started with a fireside chat between Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures (a fellow organizer of this hackathon) in conversation with Cori Zarek and Raylene Yung of US Digital Response.

(Recording in case you missed.)

Next up, a member of the HackClub student coding initiative Clare Wang interviewed Chris Cox, former chief product officer of Facebook. It was great to hear Chris answer questions from members of the wider HackClub student community.

(Recording in case you missed.)

Stay tuned to our #hackathon-announcements Slack channel for more webinars heading into Days 3 and 4, including:

• Office Hours providing the opportunity for you to consult with experts on your solution
• Saturday, March 28th: 10-11am PT with Josh Seidenfeld of Cooley LLP (Partner in Cooley's emerging companies and venture capital practice. Josh advises startups on legal issues)
  
  
• Sunday, March 29th: 11:30am-12pm PT with Valerie Osband of CARE (CARE Corps is the world’s first gig-based marketplace for humanitarian response, focused on protecting the most vulnerable people in the COVID-19 crisis. The solution, which rolls out in California in April, activates gig economy platforms to provide the surge workforce needed to ensure the last-mile provision of critical goods and services)

Student Updates

We are very excited to have students participating in this event.  Here are some of the inspiring projects coming from young participants!  

Two 17 yr olds from Rockville, Maryland have teamed on Hack Club Slack to build a non-intrusive chatting app that can help with people's mental health during the quarantine. (@itsmingjie and @larrissaTsai)

A high school 14 year old from Ontario, Canada, is working on a project that will link healthcare workers who need equipment - things like respirators, masks and ventilators with people who have the tools to make them, like laser cutters, 3d printers or contacts to manufacturer. (Rishi Kothari)

A group of high schoolers from Indianna, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Boston suburbs are building a rails app for hospitals to share their ventilators and other tools and equipment. (Amogh Chaubey with Ava Scherocman, Lachlan, Matthew, Zane and Theo)

A group of high schoolers from 3 different states are making an NLP tool that combats coronavirus misinformation and instead provides fact-checked information. (Roshan is working with Vaarij and Vraj)

Selected projects announcement

With over 14,000 builders coming together to tackle some of the biggest challenges related to COVID-19 over the past two days, we’re excited to see so many meaningful projects coming to life.

Given the number of submissions we’re now expecting by Monday’s submission deadline, we’ll need a bit of extra time before we announce the final selected projects. You can now expect to find out which solutions were selected by our judges on Friday April 10.

This extra week will give our partners’ health and technical experts an even greater opportunity to assess the potential of these ideas, and to strategize how they can support you in launching them into communities around the world with impact.

Thanks again for the momentum and energy that you’re bringing to your projects. It’s incredibly important work.